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Excerpt from River WomanChapter One: The DrowningWomen around me were screaming, running, and somebody was shouting, trying to get my attention. They'd left their clothes upon the rocks where they were beating out the yellow stains that their husbands' sweat had left in the armpits of the shirts. Soapsuds were still on their arms. I could hear the pitter-patter of their feet on the gravel that had been washed over thousands of times by the river, or covered completely when heavy rains swelled the river and made it impossible for us women to gather there. I saw when Pam hiked her skirt above her thick, scarred knees and kicked off her broken-down sneakers, so she could run faster. The other woman, whose baby always had one hand in her mouth and the other wrapped in her mama's skirt, violently shook the infant's hands away. I saw Carol's breasts swinging from side to side underneath her red T-shirt. Her dark nipples protruded because the water from washing had flattened her T-shirt against her body. I wondered if her breasts didn't hurt from flapping like that against her stomach. It wasn't till I saw Pam grab the small body in the blue shirt, which had a hole in the front, that I noticed my baby was missing from under the tree where I had left him sleeping. "Mi baby, mi baby! Oh, mi God, mi baby!" I cried, pushing my way between the women who were pulling my boy's body out of the water. "Timothy, Timothy." The women, all mothers themselves and much older than I was, wouldn't let me near my baby's soft body, which they had placed on the sand. Pam, although I'm sure she'd never done anything like this before, pressed her mouth, her chapped lips, against my baby's pink lips and tried to force some of her air into his lungs. But his little three-year-old body didn't move, couldn't move. Another woman tried to press his chest and force his heart to beat again "Hol' 'im upside down and let the water out," someone I couldn't see shouted from behind. My baby, Timothy, who squealed each time I bathed him and didn't play in the water like most babies like to do, had awakened, left the shade tree where I had put him to sleep, walked to the bank of the river, and drowned in water that was scarcely high enough to wet my skirt. All river women, and not one of us knew how to save a drowning boy. [more]
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